I think of all of the things about NYC that I miss (other than Mike and Larry of course) I miss Complacent Nation's flash-mob open-source style events the most. Watching all of these people dance to randomly generated live music while constantly moving around the streets of NYC makes me want to cry. Mostly because I know nothing this beautiful, fresh, and spontaneous will ever happen here in Middle Tennessee. 
I found this great speech by Bruce Sterling at the SXSW Conference . I've only read one thing by Bruce Sterling, (actually co-authored with William Gibson ) called The Difference Engine. I now intend to pick up some more of his books.
Oh yea…..here is the audio clip.
Well, it’s official. Blue Security called it quits today, and closed up shop. Apparently PharmaMaster was planning DoS attack on users IP addresses that were gathered when Frog client applications posted opt-out request to the spammers site.
Eran Reshef was quoted in a Wired article saying “Our community would very much like us to continue on the fight against spam, and our community has grown over the last week,” Reshef said. “But at the end of the day if we continue doing so, within a few days, major websites will go down. I don’t feel that this is something I can be responsible for. I cannot go ahead and rip up the internet to make Blue Security work. This is not the decision a commercial entity can make.”
Read more about the community reaction here.
PharmaMaster thinks he has won. Black Frog is on the way though. Powered by determination of Open Source and stealth of power of distributed P2P. If PharmaMaster thinks Blue Frog was bad wait until he faces a beast that has no master, and no single point of attack.
If I can’t get satisfaction from a perfectly legal system like Blue Frog and Black Frog doesn’t pan out i’m putting on my Black Hat.
For all those idiots that claimed Blue Security was DDoSing the spammers and their advertizers check out this quote from a Wired article that they claim came from one of the spammers working with PharmaMaster in the attacks: “Blue Security is indeed hurting our business, but not by taking down our websites,” the purported spammer wrote. “Instead, they create a daily nuisance to our server administrators.”
Oh dear! Are we being a nuisance?! What these guy have some gall bitching about people being a nuisance. They have plauged us for years. I’m pissed…and ready for war. The potiential Black Frog project has just picked up a life long dedicated programmer. It’s on bitch!
After all of the noise PharmaMaster made over Blue Frog, and all of the threats he sent stating “you will end up recieving this message, or other nonsensical spams 20-40 times more than you would normally.”, and “but do not believe for one second that we will stop this tirade of emails if you choose to stay with BlueSecurity.”. I havn’t heard one peep from PharmaMaster in days now. My spam intake each day is at a all time low (1-3 every two days). And of the few that I receive I have the pleasure of knowing that i’m sending them an opt-out request back for each one.
The other day I pointed my browser to gmail.com to check my rarely used gmail account and see if I could find any spam there to report. But when the page loaded, my wifes email popped up. She never clears out her spam folder. *cha-ching* 1647 spam messages to report! It took a while to report them all since the Firefox extention limits you to reporting 40 at a time. Mucho fun!
I’ll have to install the Firefox extension on her laptop and set it to auto report. O.o
Well I don’t know about the rest of the Blue Security Community but I think Blue Frog sucks! I signed up with them because I wanted to join the fight against spam! I was ready to give those evildoers (spammers) a little taste of their own medicine. I had grand dreams of generating almost 200 opt-out request a day (one for each peice of spam I get), but outside of the 5 or 6 threats and one bounced message with forged headers from our wonderful friend PharmaMaster there has been only one piece of such mail to speak of. When I log into my Blue Frog statistics page I find the solitary number one staring me cold in the face next to a label that says “Reported Spam”. How can I hold my head up high and say “I’m fighting those bastard!”, “I’m giving them the old ‘what for’!”, “I’m breaking my proverbial foot off in some sweet spammer boo-tay.”? How I ask!? How!?
Each time I check my mail a feeling of lonelyness and emptyness wash over me. I’ve had to resort to reading old email messages to compensate. All of this because that damn do-gooder Blue Frog. I got so desperate today I sent a message to an email address I know doesn’t exist just so I could get a bounce from the mail daemon just to get a little Inbox action pop’n, make sure.
Some say “It’s not Blue Frog’s fault!”, and “The spammer chose to stop sending you messages!”. Yea, right…you mean to tell me that the same spammers, who have relentlessly filled my inbox with nearly half a million messages over the years, and bombarded various mail server under my care with millions upon millions of email messages, has suddenly decided that they don’t want to send them to me anymore?! Thats just silly! I mean they really expect people to believe that all you have to do is simply ask the spammers to stop, and they are gonna be all like “Oh I’m so sorry…let me drop you from my database right away!”
Well if you want to stand up and fight the spammers then I suggest you use one of the thousands of other product out there. If you want a boring, empty, Inbox that almost never needs to be checked then sign up for Blue Frog you quivering wimp! Then sit there and watch your Inbox shrivle away to nothing. Before you know it you’ll be teaching your mom how to get on the “Interweb” so your can email fix each week.
(Just a note for the incredibly dense…Blue Frog is the best spam prevention tool ever created, absolutely nothing has ever put a real dent in my spam intake, Blue Frog has all but eliminated it. Please be patient with Blue Security they are still on the receiving end of a DDoS attack from PharmaMaster and thus the site will often not load. You may need to click refresh every 10 seconds or so until it loads.)
Ok, so after a few hickups moving Serendipity over to the new host I decided to give the One-Click install of Wordpress a shot. Wordpress rocks! Nuff said…
Ok..not nuff said…not even close…but i’m too lazy to go into all of it right now so download Wordpress and check it out!
I was just about the give up my search and delay this project until I had some free time to design something myself. That’s when I stubled on mp[3]act. It looked like a well designed site, which meant the interface for the system would likely be just as nice. I immedeatly dove into the demo site and began poking around. After poking around for a few minutes I had almost forgotten that I was working with it from with in a web browser. After a pleasent few minutes poking about in the demo it was now time for the pre-im-going-to-try-this-out test to determine if it this project was as good as it looked. It was time to look at the package dependancies. I was expecting a sizable hornets nest of difficult to set packages with odd configurations. What I instead got was a simple list of standard LAMP packages, with no special and/or funky setup.
It looks to me, like the perfect solution to my problem. I’ll be setting mp[3]act up this week and detailing my progress in my wiki. Once all is said and done there will be a Ubuntu walk through to follow.
I just stumbled upon this on slashdot.org. DIY Projector Plans released under the Creative Commons License are available via BitTorent download here.
I’ve been quietly watching and fantasizing about building my own projector from inexpensive and readily available components for quite sometime. I remember when I first saw plans like this selling on eBay and wondered if it was really worth it. I was sure that making a projector would be possible, I just wasn’t sure if it was feasible. After reading this PDF I will definitely be taking the next $400-600 dollars of entertainment money from our budget and building one for the second floor in our house.
While reading the document I reached a section that addressed the issues of the LCD usually having only a VGA port style input and most home entertainment devices only having Coaxial, s-video, or Composite outputs. And began chasing ideas of getting a converter, but then remembered that at the heart of my ultimate entertainment center (in my head) lies MythTV and Linux. Then like a little movie all these great little projects began flashing through my mind from years past. Mini ITX motherboards, The Open Embedded Project, various inspiring case mods, projects and tidbits from Make Magazine, my serious lack of experience and know how in electronics. 
So I have decided that this will be the next project I will be working on. I am going to design an all in one DIY Projector and MythTV setup in and self contained unit. In my mind (with only a couple of minutes of casual consideration) it will only require a power cable and a Coaxial cable, although it might also be nice if it had a network cable running to it so that databases and external sources of video and audio are available. It could likely use with a wireless network card, but will have to consider bandwidth utilization of various video and audio formats to see if it can ride on the existing wireless network or should put on a separate wireless network.
Anyway…I will be posting the results of my venture into the DIY Projector/Home Entertainment Center project as I go along. If the successive post suddenly stop then I’m probably having too much fun to post, and if they change direction then my incredibly short attention span is probably being diverted away by my family or something else more interesting at the moment.
After loving Mambo/Joomla “long time”, i’ve decided that I need a simple clean easy to use system for my site, instead of an all encompassing CMS. So Serendipity has come to save the day… I hope this end up being easy enough to use that I will begin creating regular content.
